Two Men with a Sleeping Woman

On the table lies an innkeeper's slate, the board where a tavern chalked up what its customers owed, and around it the rest of the evening. Playing cards, a pipe, a silver cup, a tankard and a backgammon box. The woman who has enjoyed all of it is asleep in her chair. One man leans over her and uses the stem of his pipe to open her dress, while the other laughs.

Dutch buyers of the late 1650s knew the joke and the warning in it, since gambling, smoking and drink in a woman were exactly what polite society frowned on. Metsu spends his finest brushwork on the things around her, the pattern of the Turkish rug over the table, the shine of the metal, the dog's fur, and paints the rest of the room more freely.